favorite state of mind

My favorite place to be varies, depending on my mood. At times, it's in front of a treadmill display, watching the timer go from 39:59 to 40:00, or another notable milestone on my workout. Other days, it's anywhere I can spread a towel across the sand and bake my skin for a few hours. A lot of the time, it's anywhere within the Bloomington-Normal city limits, when I have everyone I could possibly want within walking distance or a phone call away. My bed ranks high up on the list, but never as high as possible because sometimes it feels like it's too big for just me. Other times, it's Michigan Avenue, right as you're approaching it about to walk up to Millennium Park. But really, truly, my favorite place is thousands of miles away. 

My favorite place is somewhere between the top of the Acropolis, where you can see all of Athens, the Aegean sea, and probably the Mediterranean if you look hard enough. Between a cobblestone street running through the Plaka, fending off calls of 'Kalimera, tikanis?' from shopkeepers and trying not to get trampled by flocks of tour groups. It's somewhere between the center of the city at the Tomb of the Unknown Solider, and about an hour outside the city on the pebble beaches of Glifada. 

At times, especially recently, I find myself completely and absolutely overwhelmed. Rather than just relaxing, I let my thoughts drive me into a less-than-pleasant place, and spend afternoons worrying over something irrelevant. I simply need to teach myself that whatever happens, will happen. I need to find myself standing on top of the Acropolis and feel the wind blowing through my hair on an eighty degree day and realize that there is a lot more to life than hating my jobs, overthinking, and worrying about whether or not I'll get enough sleep tonight. Maybe not that there's more to life than all that, but maybe to just slow things down for once. Focus on the good things and soon anything negative will push itself out of focus. I inhale and try to picture what that day looked like two whole years ago. There is a little bit of smog over the city, and you can see the Mediterranean Sea through some of the mountains. It is really hot out, at least eighty-five degrees now with no shade. We timed our trip to the Parthenon poorly, since it is a Saturday and high noon. I try to pick out the ship we'll be sailing on the next day, but there are too many boats going through the port to focus on just one. My mom is trying to drag me towards some sort of photo opportunity, and I wonder just how many pictures I can take up here before I fill my camera card up halfway into our trip. I just want to preserve this moment forever.

Preserve this moment forever so that two years later when I find myself about to cry from being overtired, overworked and underappreciated, I can bring myself back to that exact moment in time and feel calm. I close my eyes for a few minutes and think about how it felt above that city to have the wind whirling around me, the sun beating down, and history rising up from the cracks in the architecture. When I open my eyes again, I don't even remember what was troubling me before, and all of the sleep I've missed in the past few days is irrelevant. 

It's like my worries are nothing when I am in my favorite place- physically or mentally, and that is exactly where my favorite state of mind rests.